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Attacking, Fast and Slow: Tottenham Edition

One of the numbers that stuck out to me when I calculated the data in Attacking, Fast and Slow, was the slow pace of Tottenham’s attack. We know Pochettino values winning the ball back high up the pitch and launching fast-paced counter-attacks, so why isn’t that clearer from the data? In the light of Jake Meador‘s piece today which had a few commenters quite rightly puzzling over my numbers, I thought I’d look deeper and work out where the bugs were in my approach, and how better to present the data so it captures the nuances in Tottenham’s attack.

First off, there were issues with my data, and I’ve added a note and updated numbers to the the last post. Luckily, most of my conclusions remain correct (and in fact the correlation of attack duration from year to year is even stronger in the fixed data), but one of the big movers are indeed Tottenham, who now reside in the bottom half for attack duration.

Let’s look in more detail at exactly how quick each team’s attacks are. Here I’ve broken attacks down into 5 second buckets up to 30s, and sorted by the 0-5s bucket:

Team

0-5s

5-10s

10-15s

15-20s

20-25s

25-30s

30s+

Southampton

47

22

20

13

10

4

28

Tottenham Hotspur

40

20

21

15

18

11

29

Arsenal

39

21

32

25

17

12

35

Liverpool

38

27

16

9

11

7

38

Aston Villa

34

17

9

7

8

5

23

Leicester City

34

30

28

21

8

2

20

Norwich City

33

23

12

16

13

7

29

Crystal Palace

33

21

19

13

9

4

17

Manchester City

33

24

30

16

14

13

48

Bournemouth

30

22

10

10

6

7

22

Watford

30

22

21

11

11

5

25

Chelsea

28

17

23

11

10

11

29

West Bromwich Albion

25

14

14

8

5

5

20

West Ham United

25

27

15

16

8

9

26

Sunderland

24

9

14

9

11

6

18

Everton

23

16

15

18

7

10

29

Newcastle United

19

23

14

10

7

9

23

Swansea City

18

26

8

17

15

8

32

Stoke City

16

14

15

6

14

6

20

Manchester United

16

14

10

8

9

34

And here’s what that looks like stacked up together:

Well that matches our intuitions much better – the two teams we know share Pochettino’s desire for quick attacks off turnovers are right there are the top, with more shots within 5s than anyone else, and with 10s numbers that stack up pretty well too. I initially worried that these numbers might just be a side-effect of weird corner numbers, but Tottenham and Southampton sit 8th and 9th in corner count.

If you look at Tottenham’s numbers in the aggregate, they’re slowed down by patient build-up play. Despite the contrast in the chart above, they can be similar to Man Utd – moving the ball from side to side, waiting for an opportunity to open up. If you remember my passing gains chart, Tottenham’s passing on average in the centre of the field is backwards. They probe forwards on the wings, recycle backwards into the centre. Eventually this leads to shots that have taken a lot of time and space in the build-up, and I’ll certainly look for better ways to categorise this. But hopefully with the approach above, people are at least now seeing the Tottenham they know and love.